Mail & Guardian Editorial: Red Alert

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Red alert

06 July 2007 07:18
If the wealth-gap is the most dangerous fault line in South African society, then service delivery protests are a seismograph charting the anger of desperate people whose government is failing them.

However you count the protests, the indicators are now in the red.

This week angry residents at Deneysville in the Free State killed an ANC councillor, an indication that the protests are increasing not only in number, but also in violence.

ANC leaders blamed the opposition United Democratic Movement for stoking resentment, but that was possible only because the fuel of bitterness and frustration was running so deep.

Deneysville performs better than many of its provincial counterparts on a range of indicators, but 40% of its residents live below the poverty line and they feel the brutal winter weather acutely.

It is not as if money isn’t available to improve their situation. On the contrary, the national treasury has doubled its budgetary allocation to local government from R64-billion in 2001 to R119-billion this financial year.

There is no lack of technocratic solutions either.

Legislators have developed state-of-the-art municipal finance legislation, the treasury releases finely detailed delivery indicators that municipalities and the provincial and local government department can use to track progress, troubleshoot and maintain accountability. Project Consolidate sends teams of bright-eyed managers from central government to help bail out delinquent municipalities.

The proposed creation of a “single public service” is the latest such measure, aimed in large part at helping central government to take direct control of provincial and local public servants.

Despite all these efforts, however, local governments are set to underspend on their capital budgets by as much as a third this financial year.

What is lacking is not just “capacity”, that hollow catch-all word for failure, but commitment and political will.

So it is hardly surprising that the country’s poorest, those worst affected by this municipal malaise, are turning against the councillors they have elected to deliver a better life.

But it is surprising — or at least disappointing — that technocratic talk is so disconnected from political action.

At the ruling party’s policy conference last week delegates barely discussed local government, let alone the embedded culture of corruption.

This week Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi passed the buck to municipalities, saying he “could only do so much”.

That is simply not good enough. It is time for political leadership to lead and to enforce accountability at every level.

An excuse for inaction
No one can sensibly quarrel with the South African Police Service’s assertion that most violent crime in the country is linked to poverty, joblessness, overcrowding, rapid urbanisation and the alcohol and drug abuse that go with these.

That is a matter of worldwide experience. In the United Kingdom, for example, the annual tally of murders has not exceeded 100 since 1980; in the poverty-stricken 1830s there were thought to be about 35 000 homicides a year in England alone.

The implication, of course, is that government departments concerned with welfare, housing, land distribution and job creation must come to the party.

But where the SAPS goes wrong is in suggesting that its hands are tied by “social fabric” crimes, which simply cannot be policed.

What that suggests is that the mass of South Africans who live in townships and shack settlements, where criminal violence is concentrated, should not expect to enjoy their constitutional right to security.

As the wealthy suburbs rely largely on private security companies for their protection, who exactly does the SAPS exist to serve?

Huddled shack settlements might be hard to penetrate and much violent crime might take place within the home, but murder is murder and rape is rape. Friends and relatives are the perpetrators often and women and children often the victims. But these are aggravating circumstances, not an excuse to sit on one’s hands.

The job of the police is deterrence, by ensuring that violent offenders have a reasonable expectation of being arrested and jailed. Figures for arrest rates and the proportion of cases that come to court, released by the police this week, provide some cheer. Last year 53% of “contact” criminals were detected and 38% of cases were brought to court, up from 48% and 28% respectively in 2002/2003.

But nothing was said of the conviction rate, which partly reflects the quality of the cases built by police and is significantly lower. If even a quarter of the criminals who are arrested go to jail, three-quarters escape scot-free.

Shoddy police groundwork and the corrupt disappearance of dockets are well-known problems that can be fixed. But another is a certain lack of investigative will. Children’s and women’s rights activists regularly complain that many police officers remain reluctant to interfere in violence in the home.